Danielle and Dave Pt 2

Day 1 (Landing Day, Sunday)
We left home early in the morning and boarded an 11 a.m. flight to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Flying for 16 hours and across many time zones felt as though we were traveling forward in time. We flew from morning to night and back to morning again; seeming to arrive six hours in the future on another continent. We arrived in Kigali, Rwanda at 12 p.m. the next day and for a second I thought we had landed in my family’s home country of Jamaica. The palm trees, warm weather, and rolling hills evoked a feeling of nostalgia and a longing to explore I had not experienced in years.

Our drive into the countryside, to where we would stay the next two weeks, took about an hour. We drove up winding roads with no railings, filled with pedestrians and motorbike taxis. The driving around us was similar to that of other countries I had visited; lots of honking and traffic regulations seen more as guidelines than laws. I sat in the backseat snapping pictures of the countryside, dealing with disappointment in my camera’s inability to capture the diversity of the croplands or how the sunlight splayed across the mountains. Everyone seemed to be doing something; even the people napping on the grass had a sense of business, as if they were catching a few winks between jobs.

In my courses, we frequently looked at photos of the homes and lifestyles of people in poverty-stricken countries. I expected the houses to be similar to the shantytowns in Jamaica, but I was still affronted by the depth of poverty I saw traveling up the mountainside. The houses were made of clay or old bricks and most of the roofs were aluminum sheets. The children wore dirty and tattered clothing, running after rolling tires in the streets or playing with broken toys in the dirt.

When we reached our destination I had already come to love the green landscape and the country land that seemed to be only mountains. I felt at home in the unpaved streets and rolling hills. The more we traveled up the hills the more the landscape shaped into my memories of Jamaica. However, the children’s home would shape my understanding of the Rwandan people. The kids greeted us when we arrived and in minutes I was reading them picture books as they clamored around me for a better view. We ate dinner with the kids and sat in on their worship at the end of the day. I had never felt more welcome in the home of strangers.